Free Enterprise is a Business Management Simulation which puts you in charge of a company that is just starting out. Your goal is to take it from this lowly startup to a large, dominant, goods manufacturer.
When you first start up a new game you have to setup your shiny new company. This involves going through a few screens and making choices about things like in which city you start, what building you want to rent out and how your startup cash is generated. These are mostly cosmetic, city and building choice only really impacts the rent you pay for your building and not much else and the startup cash are all variations on "Generate $X in Y time". Your method of generating cash also sets your initial goals and can affect your final score when you're finished, although they do enable you to simulate many different situations - especially with all the extra options that enable you to modify quite powerful things such as being able to edit your workers or not having to hire office workers.
Once your company is setup you have to decide on the initial market/s you want to enter into. Doing this can be very tedious as you have to wade through screens of statistics which, while interesting, may not even yield the best or most profitable market/s. The market also seems rather finicky at times and so you could basically pick any product that had consumers and still do reasonably well. The game does attempt to tell you, on the city selection screen, what it considers the best markets, although a more powerful analysis tool would have been more than welcome.
Now you your competition you have the entire city and all the companies within it. This isn't as bad as it sounds as the only real effect your competitors seem to have is how much market share they hold versus your market share and so can dictate how many buyers there are for your goods. Unfortunately it looks as though the computer cheats a bit, as every company seems to be far more productive and wealthier than you are, even at the very start of a game.
After you have sorted out the markets you want to enter into and decided on how you are going to do it you progress to the next, somewhat less tedious, phase of setting up the physical part of your company.
The interface for doing these tasks (many of which you will have to do throughout the game) is much better than the one used for the market data - despite them using a similar layout. Selecting items to purchase and placing them is straightforward, so is hiring new staff and assigning staff to specific duties. The game has a much more complex side to your staff that dictates how they perform in the workplace - it's a rather large number of specific traits, which you can edit with the option of "Editable Personalities" turned on and really lets you see what makes your staff tick. The staff that the game gives you are usually quite adequate for the job though, so you don't need to delve into that area if you don't have the inclination to.
Now it should be noted that you have no direct control about what your people do or when they do it while the game is actually running. The only thing you can do is specify what tasks they should perform at what machines or offices and hope that they carry them out properly.
Your little workers are actually pretty smart (with a couple of game-stopping exceptions outlined in the bugs area) and will move about loading, unloading, operating, calling people or a huge range of other tasks depending on what type of tasks they are assigned.
There are also a number of other little screens and settings you can fiddle with, ranging from the criteria that raw materials are purchased with to investigating your monthly profit and loss.
All of these are available without too much digging through the menus, and are straightforward to understand (no business management knowledge required) and manipulate.
Once you are happy with how you've got your company setup you set it in motion, and here is where the game loses its appeal quickly - it's quite boring sitting there watching things whiz around the screen, and unless you turn the speed settings up so it does that you'll be waiting all day for the game to complete one of it's own days. There is, however, a lot of detail put into this area - your workers move about doing their tasks realistically and smoothly, machines blink and flash, and goods are delivered and picked by forklifts. You can only see this fully if it's on a low or moderate speed setting, so if you actually want to get through the game without it taking years away from your life you'll have to make do with seeing them jump around the room.
When you set the game in motion you can't adjust much although you can still view reports and other non-modifiable things and make plans however you must wait either until the time period you specified or the end of the day to be able to adjust anything else. At least you can tell the game to stop at the end of the current day and if something drastic happens it'll do that anyway. As you continue to play it eventually becomes rather repetitive, and eventually it can basically become automated and you can leave it run on it's own, go do something else and come back to see what it's done.
This, as you can expect, doesn't do much for it's longevity or replayability despite the large number of markets and research upgrades available for your machines it eventually just comes down to setting something up and then waiting, and waiting, and waiting some more for it to either finish or something to happen to make you adjust what is going on.
The last major part of the game is research and it's actually somewhat interesting - you take one of the base machines in a product category, set it up as a research machine (specifying inputs to test), hire some researchers and then set them to work.
For the most part it comes down to guesswork as to what is needed although thankfully you get feedback on what parts are actually needed each time research finishes. Sometimes the parts that go into it are intuitive, and sometimes they are nothing at all like what you were expecting.
As you would expect the research paths are fixed from game to game, so once you or one of your competitors have researched a machine you can make a note of what it needs and reuse it. This is good and intuitive although it means there isn't much replayability in research.
Stability of the game is good - you can run it for hours unattended and it usually won't fall over. There are a few noticeable bugs and also ways to workaround and avoid them, however most of the bugs tend to bring the game crashing to a halt, so use the speedy save feature often until to avoid immense amounts of frustration.
The game is easy to learn, so you will be able to quickly jump into and start running your company - the game even gives you a "Quick Start" choice which avoids most of the tedious company setup process and a tutorial in the online help file which steps you through all of the basic aspects of the game with nice, simple, directions.
Even with the ease of getting into the game you'll probably go through a few restarts and some frustrating times as you try to get everything running smoothly while still actually turning a profit.
Finally, there is no multiplayer. This isn't so bad, considering how boring a multiplayer version would be due to the lack of action, both within a single company (for multiple players managing the same company) and between competing companies (since you never actually see your competitors aside from a building and some numbers). It may however, be suited to a large, persistent world.
While the game is interesting the repetitive nature of the game and the extended waiting periods, along with the low replayability factor means that it will likely only hold your attention for a short period of time and unless you're looking specifically for a business simulation you're better off with something else.
Now go, play, and enjoy!
- Deathifier
Disclosure:
This review is based on a version I found on the internet as I could not locate it in stores. I am, however, trying to obtain a copy.
Because of this there may be some minor differences between the boxed game and this review, however they can only be minor.
When I do obtain a copy I will go back over the review and check to see if parts need correcting.
